We Five (42 page)

Under his threat of tossing Will down the stairs, Big Jim kept Will on ice until the cops arrived—specifically the two cops with whom Minerva had a special relationship. (They were both on the take.)

“I'm afraid that things got just a little out of hand,” said Rose in answer to one of the officers' questions. Ordinarily this particular officer liked to conduct his interview with one of his hands roving absently about the female victim's smooth, conveniently exposed thighs, but for this interview, in deference to the severity of Rose's injuries, he kept his paws to himself.

“I worried that things might go in this direction,” said Minerva, tossing a regretful look at Will, who was now sitting handcuffed and wild-eyed upon Rose's quilted vanity chair in the corner of the room.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Rose painfully groaned.

“Oh, I really should have. Here, darling. Take another aspirin.”

“Is the professor sick?” asked Molly, sawing a piece of her stewed steak.

“Not sick, really,” replied Bella. “Just a little knocked up.” Bella, playing to the hilt the role of hostess to her six impromptu dinner guests, passed a serving plate of currant rolls to Maggie, who was seated next to her. “I barbitoned him, you see. The poor thing hasn't slept for the last two nights, so I thought I'd give him a few good winks before the sirens go off again.”

Ruth spooned up more new potatoes for her plate. “You take very good care of your new husband. You're taking good care of us, as well. Bella, you've become quite the mother hen in your premature old age.”

Bella laughed. “I get lots of help. Mrs. Hood from next door cooked most of this feast. I wanted to give all of you one thumping good meal before you head off to points unknown. Of course they're known to
you
, but I'd rather you not tell
me
in case the police drop by and start asking questions. I can certainly lie if I have to, but it's so much nicer if I
don't
have to.”

Jane cocked her head, listening. “He's snoring.”

“I'm so glad,” replied Bella. “My poor sweet Reggie. He's thinking about taking a leave of absence from the college. Since the physics lab copped it last month, he's had to teach out of the gardener's potting shed. Not that he's got that many students these days—so many have dropped out to enlist—but he says it's still hard to do anything on the two or three hours of sleep he gets at night
and
with groundskeepers and gardeners popping in and out during his lectures and rattling pots.”

Carrie reached across the table and touched the hand of her friend and former next-door neighbour. “Considering what the professor's been going through, you're both very kind to let us stay here tonight.”

“You're most welcome. But I seriously doubt you'll get to spend the
whole
night here. Since there isn't room for all of us in the shelter out back, I'm afraid that once that siren starts screaming, I'll have to send the whole lot of you off to the tube station.” Bella smiled. “
Although…
there have been some interesting rumours flying about lately—that the Nazis are deliberately avoiding this neighbourhood on Hitler's special instructions. They say he adores Du Cane Court and wants to use that whole block to house his SS officers after the inva—”

The words of Bella's explanation trailed off because Carrie had turned away from her in the middle of them. Bella bit her lip.

“I'm so sorry, love. I wasn't thinking.”

Carrie spoke without looking at Bella. “Or maybe you just thought the incendiary that ended my mother's life was a Nazi
mistake
.”

“That isn't what I—all I'm saying is that some of our neighbours here in Elmfield Road do believe this, and so they don't bother to take shelter. That's all I'm saying.”

Carrie nodded. She turned back to her friend and said, softening, “I know you meant no harm.” She tried to smile. “Maybe it isn't Art Deco Hitler likes. Maybe it's all those music hall singers and dancers who live there. Sometimes I walk along the High Road and I can hear them carrying on inside. I know what it's like to lose oneself in music—to forget there's even a war going on. To forget
everything
that eats you up from the inside.”

Maggie touched Carrie tenderly on the shoulder. “Like the night we went to the Palais and you were carried a million miles away.”

Carrie laughed mordantly. “By a man who probably should have been sitting in a prison cell.”

Bella considered Carrie for a moment before speaking. “Carrie, you haven't sworn off men altogether, have you?”

Jane laughed. “Oh, I don't think you have to worry about
that
.” At that moment Lyle returned from his trip to the lav, and all the women sitting at the dining room table, save Carrie, burst into laughter. Lyle looked at them speculatively and then checked his flies.

“No, brother, we aren't laughing at
you
,” said Jane, and then quickly correcting herself: “Well, of course we are. But not in a bad way.”

Lyle, still looking befuddled, sat down next to Carrie just as Professor Prowse padded
sleepily into the room from his early evening nap. “I
thought
I smelt Mrs. Hood's vegetable soup. Is there any left?”

“Pull up a chair, Reggie,” said Bella, going to her drowsy-eyed husband to smooth back his bed-mussed hair. “I'll fetch you a bowl. You know all the girls. You don't know Lyle. He's Jane's brother. Lyle's a fugitive from justice. These chums of mine from childhood are his abettors.”

The professor and Lyle shook hands. “You'll be pleased to know, Mr. Higgins, that
I
—” The professor interrupted himself to cough away some accumulated phlegm from his throat. “—am a moral relativist. Whatever you did, you had your reason for doing it, and it isn't my place to judge.” The professor yawned. “Are those Mrs. Hood's currant rolls? What did we do to deserve that woman's cornucopian generosity?” Assuming there'd be no answer to his potentially rhetorical question, Prowse bit off the end of one of the rolls and continued, “At times of communal crisis, members of society are forced by circumstances to do one or more of the following things, and you'll usually see all of them employed in varying measure. One: ‘Extend, amend, or bend.' The rules, that is. The rules of societal and civil engagement. Exempli gratia: Michelle Hood
extending
her wonted liberality to bounteous excess. Elsewhere, female factory workers and Land Girls being permitted to wear trousers. Cooks replacing butter with marg.”

“But certainly not by choice!” pronounced Ruth. Everyone laughed.

The professor quickly reclaimed the floor: “A chap puts on a uniform and suddenly he's given license to kill. Or rather, to follow the ‘amend and bend' model, the soldier has been provided a ‘justification' for murder. By definition, it's still murder, but we fix a wartime rider to the rule to extenuate the consequences.

“Two. ‘Break the rules entirely.' Both sides in this war have done their share of
that.
They've broken confirmed promises not to bomb civilian targets. The rules against killing noncombatants are ignored, purposefully flouted.

“Three. ‘Anarchy reigns.' All rules simply disappear. It is every man to his own defence, every man by his own conscience—should such a thing as conscience withstand the crucible of communal crisis.

“One of my colleagues—Dr. Haverson, in the astronomy department—he's conducting research on the relationship between coronal mass ejections—those bursts of solar wind and electromagnetic radiation that sometimes get tossed by the sun far into space—which means, on occasion, right at
us
—and thermospheric auroras—the Borealis and Australis—examining the degree to which the auroras are intensified by these solar events. I mention this because he and I had a very interesting discussion the other day about something quite extraordinary that took place in a small mill town outside of Manchester in 1859. It was coincident to the first recorded observation of a solar flare, and the solar storm that went along with it. The storm was the biggest there has ever been—at least since astronomers acquired the ability to recognise them. The result of this event was one of the most chilling examples of mass hysteria ever recorded.”

“Mass hysteria?” asked Ruth.

“The whole town, to put it in the vernacular, losing its bloody mind.”

“I don't understand. Just because the sky lit up with beautiful colours?”

“It was a little more than simply beautiful colours. Are you going to eat that biscuit? Thank you. The whole sky lit up like noontide in a cloudless desert, even though it happened in the middle of the night. For the people of Tulleford it augured the end of the world. Armageddon. Whatever apocalyptic designation you wish to put to it. I mention this because it's the best example I can think of for the kind of disorder and chaos that hasn't really any underlining purpose. It's the human animal in a state of utter madness. Chickens running about without their heads. This is what happened in Tulleford in the early hours of September 2, 1859. I fear this is just the sort of madness into which we will descend should this terrible war go on for too long. We'll lose every covenant of civilized society. We'll even lose our instinct for self-preservation. We'll be like those who jump to their deaths from burning buildings—mindlessly trading one form of death for another.”

Carrie got up and left the table, putting herself in a chair across the room. Molly watched her, along with all the others, and then turned to Professor Prowse and said, “Whatever your reason for bringing all this up, Professor Prowse, I don't see it. It isn't any wonder you don't sleep well at night, if these are the sorts of loathsome thoughts you live with every day.”

Bella rushed to her husband's defence. “Molly! What a horrible thing to say!”

Molly's jaw tightened. “I meant every word of it. We're all trying our best to cope with some very trying circumstances, and yet your husband seems to feel the need to tell us about something that happened years and years ago that does us no good whatsoever. I don't want to hear about it and I don't think my sisters do either. We're tired of being frightened. And we're tired of being depressed. And I don't have to sit here and listen to someone who seems to
want
to make me—
us—
even more afraid and even more depressed than we already are.” Molly got up from the table.

Professor Prowse rose as well. He looked thoroughly chidden. “I'm sorry I brought up the Tulleford incident. I truly am. Sometimes I forget I'm not standing behind my lectern addressing my students.”

Molly wasn't yet ready to suspend her reproof: “I don't fancy your students would much appreciate this sort of talk either.”

“You're right, dear girl. There's a proper time and a proper place for dispassionate scholarship, for detached analysis. This is neither a fitting time nor setting. I must say, though—and you must certainly see the inherent irony—that this does return us to my original thesis: that we live in a most extraordinary era in which the human animal is apt to behave in wildly unpredictable ways—ways that aren't governed by any of the rules of conduct we've laid down.”

“But we don't toss away everything we are as human beings,” put in Maggie from across the room. She had gone to be with Carrie. “The species simply couldn't survive if we did.”

“No, Miss Barton. It could not.” Prowse sighed heavily. “My lecture for the evening is over. Let's talk about something else. Or perhaps I should finish eating my tea in silence and then return to blissful, oblivious slumber. I used to dream. I don't anymore. My mind becomes an empty blackboard. And I wouldn't have it any other way.”

The words had hardly left Prowse's mouth before the local air raid siren began to sound. It was still light outside. This evening's visitation of terror from the skies was coming a bit earlier than usual.

Bella Prowse arched an eyebrow and half smiled. “Ah, now the moment of truth. Do we sit about this table and ignore the howl of—how was it you put it last night, Reggie?”

“The Teutonic banshee.”

“Or do my husband and I fly to our Andy and to the tedious company of the Jossers and the Collinses who share it with us, and you flee with all the rest of the neighbourhood up the High Road to the Balham Underground?”

“I'm too fagged to move,” said Jane.

“Then I'll carry you,” said Lyle. “We shouldn't stay here.”

Jane sat up in her chair. “But what about—oh, you didn't hear. You were out of the room attending the necessary. There's a theory among many of the residents of this street that Hitler won't strike here because of a rum attachment to the Du Cane.”

“That's daft,” said Lyle. “Hitler may like that building. But that don't mean Goering does.”

Carrie smiled and shrugged. “Lyle does have a point.”

We Five lifted themselves begrudgingly from their chairs. “Take whatever you like from the larder,” said Bella. “I also have playing cards, and Ludo, and Snakes and Ladders, and there are books in the study. They're mostly Reggie's so at best they'll put you to sleep for a while. But do put a jerk in it. The station is five blocks away and you haven't time to dally.”

Ruth shook her head in amazement. “Look at you. You
have
become the mother hen.”

“Just cheese it, Ruth. And you needn't tuck those biscuits away so furtively. Take as many as you want and don't feel the least bit guilty about it.”

“You're a love,” said Ruth, blowing a kiss across the table.

We Six hurried up Balham High Road to the tube station. All round, others were doing the same—parents holding the hands of un-evacuated children; old men and women, who could not help being reminded that they had done much the same thing during the First World War, that some things seemed destined never to change. Some of those in the road wore haversacks and carried blankets and Thermos flasks, prepared for a long night. One woman scuttled along dressed in only a pink night robe and matching pink swan's-down slippers. But others didn't seem in any hurry at all. They had been through this drill often enough before; someplace else would get the first pasting—that was usually the way, wasn't it? Or they would wait for Balham to sufficiently hunker down before paying their own reluctant visit to the community shelter.